Kodak Alaris Launches As Kodak Leaves Bankruptcy

Kodak has emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy as a commercial printing company, but its personal and document imaging business has been sold and will re-appear as Kodak Alaris, thanks to a deal which places that part of the businesss in the hands of the company’s UK pension fund.

The Eastman Kodak company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US in January 2012, and sold its patents in December 2012 for $525 million to a tech consortium including Apple Google and Microsoft.  Now a deal has been made which allows the UK Kodak Pension Plan (KPP) to buy the Kodak Personalised Imaging and Document Imaging businesses and create the new company, Kodak Alaris.

In-store printing services

The firm has a perpetual licence to use the Kodak brand and said it will “focus on strategic, ongoing investments in these businesses to ensure long-term growth and success”.

The new organisation will concentrate on business to business document imaging, as well as personal imaging – which will see the company offer consumers image printing services in retail outlets.

Martin Birch, Kodak EMEA managing director of document imaging, said the new firm is looking for partners “This  is good news for the channel. Our company can only grow with the support and the backing of the channel. Most importantly, the deal means that we can offer stability and opportunity for the channel.”

He said one of the major opportunities around document imaging was big data. Birch said that the company’s products could work with Microsoft Sharepoint implementations as well as other document management systems to help organisations get to grips with ever increasing amounts of data that threaten to overload companies.

“We have an open architecture to interface with most document management systems,” said Birch. “We have the widest range of scanning devices and Kodak Alaris is already the sector’s market leader.”

He said that following completion of the transaction, Kodak Alaris would have more than 4,700 employees worldwide and expected revenues of $1.3 billion.

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